


Love in The Time of Product Testing

by gogollescent



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, ableism in the narration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-05
Updated: 2012-01-05
Packaged: 2017-10-28 23:29:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/313358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for sixteenkarpileup, a.k.a, the "Karkat Gets Fucked" 'fest; the prompt was for Terezi as an employee of Bad Dragon, who occasionally feels the need to test one of her designs on her boyfriend's willing ass. Human AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love in The Time of Product Testing

She comes home one day with an unmarked paper bag in hand and an apocalyptic light in her eye: technically, Karkat knows, this is just because there are so many lava lamps placed strategically around the living room that it's almost impossible for any reflective surface not to pick up a red shine, but that is small fucking comfort when she bears down on him, her sightless gaze alive with a gory sheen and the rap of her cane on the floor counterbalanced by the crinkle of paper between her fingers.

Two inches from his face (he always sits in the same place for this) she says, "Honey, I'm home!" and kisses his nose. This is their routine. She waits until there is absolutely no uncertainty about whether he knows that she's home, and then she tells him that she's home, and then she kisses his nose. Often she misses, but she always gets there in the end. He is pretty sure that she is purposefully stunting the maturation of his features into the handsome, masculine bone structure that is definitely his birthright. He leans in, a little, to the motion, and after a moment of warm breathing she skims down to lick his mouth. She says she has the proportions of his face mapped out in her head from long experience, and he believes her, a little; in this she is unerring, once her frame of reference is fixed. 

"Mmf," he says, and then, not very hopefully: "Is that the milk I asked you to get?"

She laughs silently. "Mr. Vantas remains in charge of the groceries! Mr. Vantas has to do something around here."

"Mr. Vantas does _metric shit tons_ around here, thanks--"

"No," continues Terezi, ignoring him utterly in favor of fishing around in the bag, " _this_ is a product!"

Which is true, it turns out, for a given value of 'product', where 'product' actually means 'oversized and grotesquely carven dildo'. Some distant part of him notes that it's also red, and that the head-- unless that's the base?-- looks like a dragon.

"I thought we could test it out," she adds.

Karkat gapes at her. Then he closes his mouth; it's not like he's impressing anyone with it.

A year ago, he would have started shouting about now, it occurs to him: now, he's just shocked. It's as if, in months of living with Terezi and kissing her less exactly than she kisses him, he's grown less used to her, not more: as if with every day they move around each other in the tiny spaces of their apartment, he grows more sensitive to her freaky habits and her impossible herness, more baffled by the fact of her laughter in the dark. He can feel himself trying to dredge up the old familiar rage, but it seems to have receded past where he can reach it, leaving astonishment in its wake like foam.

"There is no way in seven screaming hells that I am going to-- to use that on you," he says, eventually.

As soon as he says it he knows that she's going to laugh again, all tooth and flash and improbable kindness. He closes his eyes and waits. 

There is no sound. He opens his eyes, and her face is tender-- relaxed, mostly, she doesn't go in for exaggerated expressions unless they're reflexive, hasn't since the accident: but soft in the mouth. "I would never ask you to!" she says, and sits down on the couch beside him, sudden and heavy. Her cane goes across her knees, delicately, its shadow brief.

"Um," says Karkat.

Her head turns. Her hair splays out under her cheek against the back of the couch, fanning out like water. 

"I want to use it on you," she says.

He stares at her. "Jesus Christ on a chartreuse pogo stick," he says, and to his unending shame it comes out with the intensity of prayer.

"I know," says Terezi.

She takes his hand.

*

Which is how, on an otherwise innocent Wednesday night, Karkat finds himself in bed at the tender hour of 6:00 p.m., naked, the love of his lamentable life bent over him with a look of careful focus on her excruciatingly beautiful face. The shadow of her nose is like a knife pressed flat against her cheek. In her hand she is holding the dildo, fingers curled loosely around its body, her thumb lying parallel to the seam in the plastic that from this distance Karkat can just barely make out. The plastic is so red that it casts red shadows on the inside of her palm: and for a second he wishes, more than anything, that he could show her-- just her hand, her forearm, the taut curve of her wrist, the primary red glow in the hollow of her palm. 

He is such an asshole. He is really, really turned on. 

"So how are we going to do this?" he says. His voice shakes a little, but whatever, he thinks. _Whatever_. He has never been able to care so little as he can in her presence. About some things, anyway.

"I think it would probably be best if you put on the lubricant," says Terezi. 

The lubricant is a bottle of clear gel that was in the bag with the-- dildo. He is starting to find it difficult to think the word. He scoops out a glob with two fingers, and rubs it between fingers and thumb, feeling the slip and stretch of it. It's odd to touch two fingers and not quite feel skin against skin, to have a shell of slickness between coiled nerves.

He starts to freak out again once he realizes that he's going to need to do something else with it, though.

"Terezi--"

"Start by rubbing it on," she says. "On and around! Get the area slicked up." Her voice is entirely serious and he is so grateful he could choke. 

Tentatively, he follows her instructions, sitting up and drawing his knees against himself. The skin around his anus is dry and warm and hairy, and it's a little gross, but he gets a layer of lubricant on, stretching up the crack of his ass almost to the point of his tailbone, where the sensation of dampness becomes disconcertingly acute. There is a part of his brain that is shutting down under the weight of his past self's fear, the echoey sense that nothing in him, from his desolate heart to his watery knees, is right or real. But, he thinks, with a strangled laugh, he probably doesn't need that much brain for this.

"That's probably enough," says Terezi, gently, which is when he realizes that he's been smearing for more than a minute. He wants to die, a bit, except he also really doesn't. He says: "Fine. What next, O wise and magnanimous fuckmeister?" 

"One finger!" she says, cheerfully. He holds the tip of his index finger against his anus, hesitating, but when she starts to say something about _or not_ he crooks it in, as quickly as he can. Which isn't very: gloop or no gloop, it's all finicky muscle and push. He thinks, _I have no idea what could bring a thinking entity to engage in this kind of unremitting bullshit_ , and Terezi says, quietly, "You're doing it, aren't you? Good;" and he changes his mind.

"Of course I'm doing it," he says, "I'm--" but he can't think of what goes after that. He tries to get it in deeper, but the angle isn't really working for him and it's progressing from uncomfortable to painful, in a hollow blunt way that makes him suspect that he is actually just such an incredible baby that he cannot handle something that-- _people_ , lots of people, people on the internet and Sollux Captor-- do often and well. He works his second finger in, instead, just up to the first joint, the two fingers pressed creakingly and uncomfortably close.

"Is there some way to measure autofucking quality?" he asks. "Some kind of set of international self impalation standards?"

"There's me," says Terezi, and she kisses his bent knee. They had tried their usual incompetent brand of foreplay, earlier, on the couch, but he kept thinking about the fine plastic tiling of dragon scales and twitching. He kept-- the point: they decided to skip it, in the end. But now the probing brush of her lips is an anchor, mooring him in the world just outside his miserable skin.

"Okay," he says. "Okay." He pulls his hand away and gets a second helping of slime. _People on the internet_ , he thinks, _all kinds of people, Karkat Vantas, you excuse for a boyfriend, are you going to be shown up by a bunch of fucking--_ and he shoves both fingers in, deep, the spread of himself too slow and aching and he's probably wearing the stupidest grimace, and he makes a sound, then, involuntary and inarticulate, a noise like a wild animal makes under siege.

" _Hey_ ," says Terezi, and he stops. He chews his lip. He holds himself perfectly still, curled around the tense and waiting center of him.

"Hey," says Terezi again, softer; her voice always has teeth in it but it's as if she's pulled her lips down over the bone. "Hey, slow down, okay? There's no rush. There's a reason this fucker is still in prototype."

"Still in what," says Karkat.

"Prototype. Do you want to stop?"

"What-- no!" he says, viciously, and means it in the instant of denial.

"Okay," she says. "Then slow down. Slow and steady wins the sexy race!"

"How can you even tell how fast I'm going?" he mutters.

"I know you're going too fast," she says, "when you stop breathing. But if you insist--"

She settles between his legs. Her hand hovers, then lands on his.

She places no pressure. Her hand is just riding his hand, her fingers cupped loosely along the knob of his wrist. The callouses at the heel of her palm are rough against his knuckles. "Again," she says; and he tries again.

*

It takes a while, but-- he gets it, this time, or maybe Terezi does, communicating arcane sodomy secrets through the surface of her palm. They get it. He ends up flat on his back, legs splayed, feeling warm and slick and half-opened. Terezi is smiling a rare, secret smile, the curve of her mouth tucked deep into her cheek.

"Wipe that grin off your face," he orders, and she leans down and scrubs her face against his stomach, like a kid or a dog, _wipe;_ her eyelashes skimming the corner of his ribcage. 

With her face clean and grave, she crawls to the other end of the bed for a pillow. "Under your hips," she says, by way of explanation. Under his hips it goes.

There's a moment, then, where nothing happens. She's poised over him; her hold on the dildo is tighter but less certain, the angle of her hand wavering. Karkat says, "Well?"

She looks annoyed, although she doesn't glance in the direction of his voice. "Impatient!"

And he is, he realizes. Against all fucking odds.

"Sorry," he says.

Her shoulders relax, slightly. "Your enthusiasm is adorable," she says. "The mighty dragon notes your eager compliance and revels in it."

"Oh my god, you colossal nerd--"

Her hand drops.

She's about two inches short of his ass, and she's going to realize it as soon as she reaches bare blanket. He already knows how her mouth will twist, a little, in wry amusement at herself.

He catches her hand. 

He doesn't correct her aim like this very often; doesn't usually see what's going to happen early enough. She freezes in his unexpected grip, and he could punch himself, but then-- she keeps going, following the pull of his hand, until the rough head of the dildo brushes up against his asshole. Her head is bent, her hair falling forward around her face. "Sorry," he says, "Jesus, Terezi, I shouldn't have--"

"You shouldn't have," she agrees. "But you're learning."

And with that she drives it into him.

"Fuck," he says, but she doesn't stop, and he is pathetically glad. He'd started to get an inkling of what was nice about this, before, with the fingers and the slip and the slow, teasing movement-- but he could hardly feel his fingers, by the end, and his arm had been tired. The dildo, though, with its fucking _tesselated scales_ and the curve of its asinine head: it digs into him like mercy.

Terezi moves it in long, deep strokes, almost up to the base and back until it's just the wicked tip against his crack, exploratory and, also, expert.

"Fuck," he says, "you-- fuck--"

"Correct," says Terezi, and rests her other hand at the flat of his hip, her long fingers stroking up against the base of his dick. It occurs to him that she still has all her clothes on, and that this is deeply unfair; he's just not sure to who.

"Don't you," he gasps, wretched in his wanting, "shouldn't I be doing something, for you, right now, like a non-unmitigated douchebag?"

"A mitigated douchebag," says Terezi, and then, "Not this time, I think."

She speaks matter-of-factly, and it sounds like a promise. It, more than anything, makes him arch high, his body one long nerve, one anxious song. 

He starts to lose it after that. Haze hot in his eyes and pulse heavy in his ears, he twists and jerks and probable makes an unfathomable nuisance of himself: when he comes, it's stuttering and easy. A thing discrete from the reality of need.

She slides it out, neatly, afterward. She puts it on the nightstand near his head. It's the first really good look he's gotten at it, and it turns out that it is the stupidest thing he's ever seen. The post-coital gloss does not improve the sculpture any.

He shifts a little, and rolls onto his side. She's climbed over him, already, to settle onto her half of the bed. Moving his legs around the empty place in his gut, he feels bizarrely free. 

"I can't believe you fucked me with that," he says.

"I take my work very seriously," she replies.

"Thank you," he says; but what he means is _please_.

She doesn't try to find his eyes by following the sound of his voice. She lies still, her filthy hands folded on her breast, and says "You're welcome"; and he hears, _yes,_ clear as the darkness after the light.


End file.
